


Paladin

by greywash



Series: Spring Break Creative Calisthenics [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Fighting, Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 03:55:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6358012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He’s little," Harry'd say from the doorway, "but he's scrappy!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paladin

**Author's Note:**

> Over spring break, [I am asking for some prompts on Tumblr](http://fizzygins.tumblr.com/post/141318279512/okay-so-i-have-been-having-an-awful-time-with) to help me shake out the writerly cobwebs. [majela23](http://majela23.tumblr.com/) requested: "Prompt: crack shot. As in, how did John Watson come to be such a crack shot?"
> 
> **Warnings for disturbing content**. My full warning policy is in my [profile](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile#warnings); if you have any questions, please feel free to [email me](mailto:greywash@gmail.com).

Harry used to tease him about it. "He’s little," she'd say from the doorway, "but he's scrappy!" in the too-bright too-blonde tone best calibrated to irritate their mother, who in reply would click her tongue against her teeth and shoo Harry out of their cupboard of a downstairs loo so she had room enough to tack the edges of John’s forehead back together while he stared at his split knuckles; licked copper, hot and viscous, off his upper lip. 

In school when John fought it had felt good and right and righteous. He refused to be a bully, and he didn’t back down; he got into it over how other kids threw around slurs or his teammates talked about girls and it meant that it didn’t stand out when with creeping-ice sliding down his throat and the back of his spine when Neil Pattinson said _She’s probably some kind of_ and John said _Shove off_ and Neil didn’t so John punched him in the stomach, bloodied his nose, tore out a chunk of hair. John'd always been good at fighting. He became a doctor because he was so good at fighting he needed a never-ending stream of patients to do it for; he joined the RAMC because it seemed from London like the battles would be worth more, there. He was a good soldier, too. Came to him like breathing, every part of it: gaining ground, pushing on, firing straight, hitting hard. _Little, but scrappy_ , Harry’d said, three decades ago. Some things don’t ever change.

It’s that part that Sherlock didn’t really understand, not truly. Not the why of it. He’d thought that John needed excitement, adventure. That what he’d lost with the army was an adrenaline rush. John never knew how to say it, really, what he’d found at that college across the gap between buildings: the hot-straight-true feeling of fighting for something important, nothing more, nothing less.

After, he keeps taking the gun out. Not to use, he doesn’t think. He couldn’t use it, not now. He just keeps taking it out. Waiting, he supposes, for something to happen, for that silence to transmogrify into something else entirely. A breath between sentences. An extended joke, perhaps. A brief pause in the action, before the fight falls good and right and righteous back into John’s hands.


End file.
